Line 9: Journey along the pipeline

Pipeline journey

All along the pipeline

It has flowed quietly beneath our feet for nearly 40 years, carrying the oil used to power our lives. But a plan to reverse and increase the flow of oil in Line 9 has thrust the 30-inch pipeline into the spotlight, sparking fears of catastrophe, and promises of prosperity

It was built in 1975, of quarter-inch steel made in Hamilton, coated in a single layer of polyethylene tape, designed to be reversible, to change with the ever-fluctuating oil markets.

It was called Line 9.

In 1976, it went into operation, flowing crude oil from west to east, feeding a half-dozen hungry oil refineries in Montreal.

More than two decades later, Enbridge reversed the flow as a glut in overseas markets led to lower prices. Foreign oil has been glugging down Line 9 from Montreal to Sarnia ever since.

But North America is in the midst of another oil boom, with Alberta’s oil sands and North Dakota’s Bakken region alone producing nearly 2.7 million barrels per day in 2012.

There aren’t enough pipelines to move it all to market. And, because North American product is selling for less than the oil that comes from overseas, Quebec refineries are eager to get their hands on the cheaper supply.

Now it’s considering Enbridge’s application to re-reverse the section known as Line 9B, which runs 639 kilometres between North Westover and Montreal. The company also proposed an increase in capacity, from 240,000 barrels per day to 300,000 (though the pipeline only actually moved about 64,000 barrels a day from 2009 to 2011). Public hearings held in Toronto and Montreal concluded in October 2013.

The board’s recommendation will need the federal government’s stamp of approval.

The Star followed Line 9 from Montreal to its birthplace in Sarnia, meeting with people living and working alongside it. To some, it is a means to riches or, at least, survival. To others, it’s a ticking time bomb that threatens all they hold dear — for themselves, and for generations to come.

These are their stories.

People along the pipeline

Thousands of lives intersect, often unknowingly, with thepipeline, Line 9. To some, it is a means to money and a wayof life, but for others it’s a disaster waiting to happen.

MONTREAL, Que. — It’s a straight shot east along Rue Notre-Dame, away from the skyscrapers of downtown Montreal toward a new skyline of smokestacks and tank farms and low-lying brick apartments.

The Industrial Association of East Montreal has its office in city hall, on the fourth floor with a view of the St. Lawrence River and, in the distance, the outlines of the steaming facilities that compose one of Canada’s petrochemical powerhouses.

Once, there were six oil refineries in Montreal’s east end. Four shut down in the 1980s; in 2010, Shell Canada closed the gates of its 76-year-old facility. Suncor’s Montreal refinery is the last one standing.

Dimitri Tsingakis, general manager of the association that represents the area’s titans of industry, says that refinery is the starting point of an economic web that largely sustains the community.

“The refineries are very important for the community, in the sense that overall they provide significant jobs,” says Tsingakis, an engineer who’s worked for the association since 2006.

Some 21,000 people work in Quebec’s chemical industry. The province exported $5.8 billion worth of chemicals and plastics in 2011, according to federal government statistics. There are an estimated 4,000 jobs affected by the Line 9 project.

An association study suggested 800 businesses supply goods and services to that industry, everything from washing uniforms to renting equipment to bars that sport names like Pub L’Industriel.

The Line 9 project would free Suncor and Valero Energy’s Levis, Que.-based refinery from having to import more expensive oil from overseas.

Enbridge put savings for Quebec’s refineries at $23 billion over 30 years if given access to lower-cost Canadian and American oil.

In its submission to the National Energy Board, Suncor wrote that its market in Quebec and Eastern Canada is the country’s “most competitive.”

“While refined product supply may be sourced from outside the province of Quebec, these supply sources would not provide the jobs, the spending nor provide the petrochemical feedstock that a Quebec refining operation does,” notes the submission by Suncor, which was “not available” for an interview.

“Suncor Montreal refinery cannot afford to be left behind as its competitors secure access to the most competitive supplies of oil expected to be available for the foreseeable future.”

And the larger community can’t afford to have Suncor struggling or gone. It’s hulking refinery is the first point in a tightly linked “industrial ecology” upon which thousands rely.

Suncor, for example, is the first link in the “polyester chain,” producing the xylene that, after stops at several other petrochemical factories in East Montreal, emerges as polyester plastic, the stuff of water bottles, Kraft mayonnaise containers, fleece coats, food wrapping.

And when the big players are hurting, the smaller ones are going under.

“People have told us their business base has gone down since, for example, Shell shut down,” says Tsingakis. “I know some companies, their business has gone down to the point where they’re just barely breaking even.”

Serge Otsi Simon, Grand Chief, Mohawk Council of Kanesatake

‘We have to take a stand’

Serge Otsi Simon. JESSICA MCDIARMID / TORONTO STAR

KANESATAKE, Que. — Grand Chief Serge Simon has a stack of glossy brochures on his desk and a cheque for $5,000.

The elected head of the Kanesatake band council is being courted by companies that have, or want, pipelines running through the traditional lands of this Mohawk First Nation on the north side of the Ottawa River, about a 45-minute drive west from Montreal.

The money’s exciting, he says. It’s going to the Riverside Elders Home.

That’s about the only good thing he has to say about pipelines.

Line 9 crosses the Ottawa River about 20 kilometres upstream from Kanesatake and does an arc around the First Nation’s territory on its way to Mirabel, Que.

“The only economic benefit that we might see is if there is a break in the line and we need to go clean it up,” says Simon. “I’m not willing to say that’s an economic development opportunity. That’s an environmental disaster.”

There is little in the way of economic development in Kanesatake, where about 1,600 live on territory nestled up beside the town of Oka, says Simon, aside from dozens of colourful cigarette shacks that line the main road.

But it’s about more than economic development or $5,000 cheques.

“It’s really a question of our responsibility to humanity,” he says. “This can’t keep going on, this irresponsible development of resources. The bottom line will do you absolutely no good when the environment, the damage that’s been caused becomes irreversible.”

A hill rising between Kanesatake and Oka was the site of the 1990 Oka Crisis. Kanesatake members set up a blockade to stop the town of Oka’s plans to expand a golf course across land that held an ancient burial ground. When provincial police were called in to disperse the standoff, the situation turned violent. Eventually, the army was called in and the crisis ended in September 1990. A police officer, Corp. Marcel Lemay, was killed in the stand off. No one was ever charged.

Simon remembers the tanks rolling onto the land he grew up on, the bayonets affixed to soldiers’ guns, the razor wire strung between trees and the F-18 fighter jets roaring overhead.

“We’ve seen what the consequences could be for standing up for certain issues and we don’t wish that to be repeated. But we would like to have the same kind of spirit within different communities across the country, to stand up,” says Simon.

“We’ve survived wars, we’ve survived famines, we’ve survived almost total assimilation by Canada, but the one thing we won’t survive is our own indifference.”

Dana Purvis and Allan Marr, landowners

‘You don’t want a leak on your property’

Allan Marr. JESSICA MCDIARMID / TORONTO STAR

LANSDOWNE, Ont. — If they had known, they never would have done it.

When Allan Marr and Dana Purvis bought their farm, 60 hectares of rolling fields and forest near Lansdowne, Ont., 15 years ago, they didn’t put much thought into the two pipelines that cut through the back third of the property.

“We were younger and naïve,” said Purvis. “I thought if anything happened, they’d make it right.”

Enbridge’s Line 9 runs alongside a TransCanada natural gas line through the Purvis-Marr farm, about halfway between Gananoque and Mallorytown.

They heard from Enbridge for the first time in 2013, a phone call from a representative in June saying a section of the pipeline had to be dug up.

Pipeline companies conduct so-called “integrity digs” when high-tech inspection tools detect flaws — often cracks or corroded areas — that could lead to a leak or rupture.

Purvis and Marr met with Enbridge officials, who explained a bit about what was to be done.

The work was supposed to be complete by late September.

Fall dragged past Thanksgiving before they heard from Enbridge again, wanting to start work in late October.

Marr said no.

“There’s people back there hunting, including myself,” he says. Enbridge said, no problem, they’d plan the dig for the new year.

The next day, Marr had to explain yet again to an Enbridge subcontractor who wanted to start work that no, it wasn’t happening until 2014.

The next afternoon, Purvis took their big, shaggy dog, Logan, for a walk out to the back of the property.

“Sure enough, they were back there,” says Purvis. “I just yelled at them, saying you don’t have permission to be here so you need to leave right now.”

They complained to Enbridge, which dealt with it.

Company spokesperson Graham White says the workers were “in direct violation of clear directions from both Enbridge and Mr. Marr to stay off the property until the new year” and that the company values its relationships with landowners “tremendously.”

But the experience, coupled with a confrontation in 2012 when they came upon a TransCanada crew brushing and cutting trees on their property without permission, has left a bitter taste.

“You don’t want a leak on your property, you want them to come and do the work,” says Purvis.

“I do, too,” says Marr. “But I want answers and I want the truth and I want them to stand up and do what they say they’re going to do, not sneaking around behind our backs.”

The episodes have also prompted them to look more closely at what would happen if there was a spill on their land.

“This property is our retirement, this is all we have,” says Purvis. “If this farm is worth nothing when we go to sell it, we’ll have nothing.

“I would never ever do it again. I would never buy a piece of property that had anything like that on it, that somebody had to have access to.”

A 20-minute drive from her farm north of Gananoque, Marble Rock Rd. runs across a right-of-way, a swath of cleared ground under which a trio of pipelines, including Line 9, run. A half-hour bushwhack alongside the banks doesn’t turn up any telltale poles topped with warning signs.

But further along the road, an outhouse-shaped Enbridge station stands in a field. Fifty metres beyond it, Line 9 is under the Gananoque River.

The river, which empties into the St. Lawrence, is one of dozens of rivers and creeks that Line 9 passes on its route from Sarnia to Montreal. But, as Conger explains, it flows through a particularly unique, and sensitive, environment.

Conger, 67, is president of the Algonquin to Adirondacks (A2A) Collaborative, a conservation group working to protect a 93,000-square-kilometre region that stretches from Adirondack Park in New York state to Algonquin Provincial Park in eastern Ontario.

Back in the kitchen at her organic farm — she grows vegetables and just got chickens, who live in the newly minted “Palais Poulet” — Conger has a two-inch-thick file folder overflowing with newspaper clippings, research documents, presentations on the A2A region and what a spill could do to this corner of the world.

The region is the most extensive north-south wildlife corridor east of Lake Superior. It hosts one of the highest plant biodiversities in Canada, with five overlapping forest systems. The UNESCO-designated Frontenac Arch Biosphere is here, home to 34 at-risk species.

“It is biologically one of the most unique and rich areas in Canada,” says Conger. “It’s rich, but it’s endangered. The area is under pressure in a lot of ways.”

Conger heard about Enbridge’s application through a notice in the newspaper last spring.

The township, Leeds and Thousand Islands, wasn’t planning on attending public hearings on the project. So Conger decided she would.

“When I started to investigate the potential impacts for people and wildlife of a major spill, I got very concerned,” she says.

The soil here is shallow, a skiff on top of bedrock. That bedrock is replete with cracks that drop down to groundwater aquifers that supply drinking water.

The oil would seep through the soil to bedrock and flow along it until it reached the cracks. Then it would drop into the aquifer “almost immediately,” she says.

According to Enbridge’s engineering assessment of the pipeline, filed as part of its application to increase capacity and reverse flow, the highest concentration of cracks and corrosion are between its Hilton and Cardinal pumping stations. The A2A region falls within that.

Enbridge and other pipeline companies say the infrastructure can be used safety “in perpetuity” with proper maintenance but Conger has her doubts.

“If you’re going to have a pipeline in this area, it seems to me that it has to be at the highest level of safety,” says Conger. “And maybe a 38-year-old pipeline is not the best choice. Maybe we should be looking at re-laying the pipeline through this area.”

She’s lived near the pipeline around Bayview Ave. and Cummer Ave. in North York for 30 years. Her two sons, now university students, attended Cummer Valley Middle School on Maxome Ave., right beside the hydro corridor that Line 9 follows across the GTA. It’s been there all their lives.

Heavy crude from Alberta’s booming oilsands is so thick — think molasses — it must be diluted with chemicals before it can flow through a pipe. Pipeline companies insist the process is safe, while critics fear diluted bitumen, sometimes called “dilbit,” is especially corrosive and more difficult to clean up. And light crude extracted from North Dakota is more flammable than traditional crude, U.S. regulators warned on Jan. 2, after the oil was involved in a string of fires and explosions following train derailments.

“We knew that there was a pipeline there but we knew that it was built for other purposes than fracked oil (from North Dakota) and diluted bitumen,” said Eriksen.

During Toronto’s floods in July 2013, Eriksen’s niece was trapped on the subway for five hours as water seeped into the tunnels. Imagine, says Eriksen, if that was oil.

“That really frightens me,” she says.

Eriksen heard about Enbridge’s plans for Line 9 in a newspaper ad in March 2013, announcing public hearings on the project.

She was struck by how difficult it was to participate. Under new federal legislation, introduced in the 2012 omnibus budget bill C-38, members of the public had to apply to comment, filling out a nine-page form justifying their right to weigh in. And the board can still refuse anyone not directly affected. The legislation is currently the subject of a court challenge that argues it violates Canadians’ right to freedom of expression.

“I was appalled,” says Eriksen, who recently retired from a career working in public health for both the federal government and private industry.

In government, “unless you’ve got a big stick and tough laws, industry can get away with a lot. The public has to be vigilant,” says Eriksen. “That’s part of why I decided to get involved.”

She successfully applied for intervenor status, meaning she could comment and ask questions during the hearings process.

Her concerns were myriad. Emergency spill response times of between 1.5 and 4 hours in the GTA; emergency plans that lacked site-specific protocols for potentially catastrophic spill locations like the Finch subway (Enbridge has since agreed to create these plans); drinking water; property values.

Eriksen wasn’t impressed with company responses to her questions, some of which referred to her requests as “fishing expeditions.” Enbridge characterized information requests from municipal and provincial governments similarly in some cases.

“There was a lot of almost arrogance on the part of Enbridge to the intervenors,” says Eriksen.

The company noted in its final arguments that the term “fishing expeditions” is routinely used during energy board proceedings and said it “certainly intended no offence.”

When the hearings ended, Eriksen turned her attention to pushing the province and municipal governments to ban diluted bitumen and Bakken crude, and to making sure more people know about Line 9.

“There are a lot of frightening aspects about this thing, and so many people are unaware of it.”

Hunter Reid, CEO/chair, TDT Crews

Will work, will travel

Hunter Reid. ANDREW FRANCIS WALLACE / TORONTO STAR

HAMILTON, Ont. — Hunter Reid has the workers and they have the skills. If the jobs are not here in Ontario, they’ll go some place else.

Reid is chair and CEO of TDT Crews Inc., a Hamilton-based company that supplies crews of skilled Canadian workers to regions that need them. The bulk of the work is in oil and gas; the bulk of the demand is in the West.

The Line 9 project could change that, at least partly.

Currently, about half of TDT Crews’ business is split between Alberta and Saskatchewan. Ontario sees about a third.

The company wouldn’t necessarily see any work on Line 9, if it’s approved. But a project like it could easily employ 10 to 30 per cent of its workforce. The highest number of workers the company had at a time was nearly 400, in 2012.

“So it’s significant,” says Reid. “Even if we don’t get the work here ourselves, I’d still strongly support the project.”

Enbridge, in documents submitted to federal regulators, predicted the project would contribute $25 billion to the Canadian economy over a 30-year period.

It would mean a labour income increase of $350 million and an employment increase of 5,500 person years, mostly in Ontario and Quebec, according to the company’s application.

Line 9 ran at about 64,000 barrels per day between 2009 and 2011, just 26 per cent of its capacity. If Enbridge’s proposal isn’t approved, the Line 9B section from north Westover, near Hamilton, to Montreal would be idled.

“If there’s not work in the province, we’ll move them out of the province to get that work,” says Reid. “Ultimately, people need to feed families, that’s why we do what we do.”

Reid stresses the pipeline needs to be safe and Enbridge needs to disprove naysayers by responding to their concerns, something he believes the company is doing. And the province needs the economic benefits.

“It’s a fair amount of work to be done right here, and Ontario needs the work,” says Reid.

“Whether it’s Enbridge or somebody else, someone must help take the country … to other markets — period,” says Reid. “And the longer we take to get there, the more we lose in the process.”

Emily Ferguson, creator of Line 9 Communities website

‘Everyone loves maps’

Emily Ferguson. JESSICA MCDIARMID / TORONTO STAR

GUELPH, Ont. — Emily Ferguson went to her first public information meeting about Line 9 in February 2013.

Then a McMaster University student in geography and environmental studies, Ferguson went to several more. In Halton region, she asked Enbridge for an information package that had been provided to council, which included maps of Line 9’s passage through the area.

Ferguson says a company official asked her who she was working for, then agreed to send a copy — if she showed her driver’s license.

Enbridge offers a different version of events: company spokesperson Graham White says “after an abrupt and confrontational approach from Ms. Ferguson,” an employee asked her who she was but did not request identification.

“We provide our information freely, there is no reason someone would have to show ID,” says White, who characterized Ferguson as “a stringent opponent of the project and an activist.”

“I started mapping the pipeline that night,” says Ferguson, now 25. “I thought people needed to know where it is. I hadn’t known it existed.”

Ferguson used Google maps satellite view to follow the pipeline right of way, which appears as a strip of cleared ground from above. At each road crossing, where pipeline companies are required to post warning signs, Ferguson switched to a street view, doing a 360 to make sure she was in the right spot.

She started out where she grew up, the small community of Glenburnie just north of Kingston. She learned that Line 9 passes the playground behind her childhood school. Ferguson didn’t intend to go beyond that, initially.

“Then I kept finding more points and it just kept going.”

She learned that Line 9 passes near Seneca College in Toronto, where she attended school for three years.

“I had literally been living beside the line my entire life … and didn’t even know it existed,” Ferguson wrote on the website she would soon launch. “All of a sudden, things became very personal.”

She kept going for 639 kilometres, the entirety of Line 9B.

By March, she had launched the Line 9 Communities website, posting nearly 50 maps along with information on Enbridge, Line 9 maintenance activities, risk assessments, federal regulations — the list goes on.

But it’s the maps that garner the most views.

“Everyone loves maps,” says Ferguson. “People just want to know where it is.”

In April, her grandmother, who had urged her on throughout the project, went into hospital. Cancer.

Ferguson filled out an application to participate in the public hearings from her grandmother’s hospital room. When she hit send, she told her grandmother it was done.

“She said, ‘Good. 2013 is going to be your year,’” recalls Ferguson.

Ferguson has always been interested in energy issues but this one is different. It’s personal.

Three days later, her grandmother died. Ferguson’s grandmother on the other side of her family passed away in December. Both are buried within a kilometre of Line 9.

Margaret Vance, landowner

You’ll never know it’s there

Margaret Vance. ANDREW FRANCIS WALLACE / TORONTO STAR

BRIGHT, Ont. — The stonewalled house stands alone in the vast, flat fields.

Those fields are white, windswept in December. But in summer, they are flush with rutabagas and corn on the 100-hectare Vance farm near Bright, Ont.

It’s been in the family for 80 years. Dave Vance, 74, was born here, in the large airy room off the kitchen. That’s where he’d like to die.

Three Enbridge pipelines — 7, 8 and 9 — cross the property. Line 9, which went into operation in 1976, is the newest of the trio.

When the company man came to the door back in the day, they told farmers not to worry, says Dave’s wife, Margaret.

“Once it was in the ground, you’ll never even know it’s there,” she quotes.

That has not been the case.

Her fight for landowners who have pipelines on their properties began in the 1990s when Interprovincial Pipe Line Inc. (IPL) planned to convert one of the lines from crude oil to natural gas.

Many landowners worried about the safety of natural gas, a more volatile product, in the pipeline built in 1967. They pooled resources, rustled up support from fellow farmers to hire a lawyer and intervened, as the Ontario Pipeline Landowners Association, in National Energy Board hearings.

They were successful. The federal regulator rejected the project.

“We could see that our organization needed to continue,” says Margaret.

Two decades later, Margaret has travelled the country meeting with landowners in other provinces. She’s represented neighbours in court, up against high-powered litigators from Toronto and Alberta over a $1,500 dispute. (She won, and was taken out to dinner for her efforts).

She bought shares in IPL, which became Enbridge in 1998, to get through the door at shareholders’ meetings — a chance to get the ear of the company CEO, and, on more than one occasion, give him an earful.

“They’re scared when they see her there,” Dave chuckles.

But problems for landowners persist, says Margaret.

Integrity digs are “very disruptive.” Crops are destroyed, soil is torn up and conflicts between companies and landowners have escalated to the point of court injunctions.

Rules regarding the 20-metre easements under which the pipelines run, bought decades ago for a few hundred dollars when pipelines were touted to farmers as projects “for the good of the country,” are still unclear in federal regulations, says Margaret. Farmers aren’t allowed to cross them with “heavy equipment” without permission. But no one’s sure what constitutes heavy equipment.

In the 1990s, the energy board tacked on 30-metre “control zones” to either side of easements where farmers aren’t allowed to disturb soil deeper than 30 centimetres without consulting pipeline companies. That adds up to four hectares on the Vance’s farm. There was no compensation.

They worry too about disused pipelines being left in the ground. The National Energy Board must approve plans to abandon a pipeline, but it doesn’t necessarily require removal of the pipe. It’s a safety concern for farmers.

Imagine a combine, bin full of grain behind the driver, crossing an abandoned pipeline, perhaps a metre in diameter, says Margaret. Imagine that pipe collapses, the machine tips forward.

“One dead farmer,” says Dave.

“They make hundreds of billions of dollars from the use of this land,” says Margaret. “All we ask is that they take their junk with them when they go.”

Margaret got to know Enbridge’s former CEO, Pat Daniels, well during the 11 years he helmed the company. She has yet to meet Daniels’ replacement, Al Monaco.

“I haven’t confronted him yet, but it might be (soon),” she giggles. “It’s been quite a journey. People say, ‘Are you still doing that, Marg? I say, ‘Pipeline’s still in the ground.’”

Hugh Moran, executive director, Ontario Petroleum Institute

Potential for the future

Hugh Moran. ANDREW FRANCIS WALLACE / TORONTO STAR

LONDON, Ont. — The oil production industry in Ontario is not the biggest — far, far from it — but it is one of the oldest.

The province has been glugging out black gold since North America’s first commercial oil well went into operation about 40 kilometres southeast of Sarnia in 1858.

Ontario producers lay claim to a host of industry trailblazers: first North American petroleum company, first oil exchange, along with a plethora of techniques that saw Ontario oil workers poached from home soil by companies operating all over the world in the late 1800s and 1900s.

But Hugh Moran, executive director of the Ontario Petroleum Institute, says production in Ontario has dropped in the past decade, from about 1.5 million barrels a year to 500,000. (To put that in context, Canadians use about 1.6 million barrels of oil each day, about one third of which is consumed in Ontario).

The Ontario Petroleum Institute, which represents oil and natural gas producers, supports the Line 9 project, arguing it would boost the oil and natural gas industry, worth about $4 billion a year to the Ontario economy.

“The challenge for the industry, and one of the reasons we got involved in the Line 9 hearing, was the fact that having that line available gives our producers a market choice for selling their product,” says Moran.

An eastward flowing pipeline would open the doors to selling Ontario oil to refineries in Quebec and New Brunswick as well as those in the United States.

“It essentially gives our producers the possibility, the potential, for the future, because if you’re selling to one company and something happens, you’ve got to have choices someplace else,” says Moran.

There are about 120 companies or individuals with well licenses in the province now.

More options for market might also draw more companies into developing Ontario oil. It’s estimated that about half of recoverable oil and natural gas in southwestern Ontario — where the vast majority of production occurs in Lambton County — remains to be developed. And it’s tough to draw companies to invest in it when competing with far larger reserves in places like Alberta and Saskatchewan.

“The challenge is to increase the activity,” says Moran.

Joe Miskokomon, Chief, Chippewas of the Thames First Nation

An awakening of the people

Joe Miskokomon. JESSICA MCDIARMID / TORONTO STAR

CHIPPEWAS OF THE THAMES FIRST NATION, Ont. — A lone barn is all that remains of the sprawling residential school that ran for nearly a century on the Chippewas of the Thames First Nation.

Its high peaked roof is falling in on the rafters below; its walls are flecked and sagging with age; the Thames River is eating its way toward the northernmost foundations.

Chief Joe Miskokomon would like to preserve the barn. There was talk of moving it back from the river. But its insides are scratched and carved with names of hundreds of the children who went through Mount Elgin Indian Industrial School before it closed its doors in 1947.

No one’s figured out how to preserve those, disassemble them and put them back together again.

Other things, though, are coming together.

When Line 9 was built in 1975, there were few, if any, rumblings of dissent from First Nations, says Miskokomon. Generations had gone through the residential school system.

“Your only chance for survival was to forget about your language and culture, your history, your past … Many people believed that it was true, that maybe we don’t have any rights, maybe there is nothing left.”

That’s not the case anymore. There has been an “awakening of the people,” says Miskokomon, and First Nations across the region and the country are working more closely together to protect the rights that were enshrined in the 1982 Constitution.

In 2013, the Chippewas of the Thames constructed its entire submission to federal regulators on Enbridge’s proposal around issues of aboriginal rights. While environmental concerns are also forefront — traditional teachings include being stewards of the land — Miskokomon rightly predicted those would be well-covered by other parties.

The “rights-based approach” was unique.

Under the Constitution, the Crown has a duty to consult and accommodate First Nations on matters that could adversely affect their rights.

In the case of Line 9, lawyers jointly representing the Chippewas of the Thames and Aamjiwnaang First Nation in Sarnia argued a spill would threaten rights to lands, health, drinking water, hunting and fishing, among others. And, they argued, the proposed project increases the likelihood of such a disaster.

“Nobody wants to live with that guillotine over their head,” says Miskokomon, who has been elected chief for six non-consecutive terms since 1995.

Consultation between the federal government and First Nations on the Line 9 project did not take place.

“The Crown cannot insulate itself from its duty to consult Aboriginal peoples by devolving decision making authority to non-Crown actors or by remaining indifferent to decisions that may affect Aboriginal rights and interests,” lawyer Scott Smith told a three-member panel from the National Energy Board.

The board should shelve the project until that consultation has taken place, Smith argued.

The First Nation also, in Miskokomon’s affidavit filed to the board, claimed part of revenues generated by transporting product through traditional lands on a go-forward basis. Compensation for historical land use and infringements of rights would be addressed elsewhere.

It’s the main artery into Sarnia’s industrial heartland, long known as Chemical Valley, the ignominious title given to the cluster of oil refineries and plants that compose 40 per cent of Canada’s chemical industry. Thousands of cars used to clog the street at shift change.

A railroad overpass is all that separates the quaint, modest homes of Sarnia’s downtown from a sea of belching smokestacks, intricate webs of pipes and tanks the size of apartment buildings. And a Tim Hortons.

Line 9 is one of dozens of pipelines in Sarnia, a city that still relies on the chemical industry as its main economic driver.

“It’s one of many and it’s not one we have had any issues with in its history,” says Bradley, who, at 58, has been mayor for 25 years.

Up ahead, three of five lanes on Vidal are blocked off, along with Churchill Rd. that runs perpendicular to it.

A spill three months earlier, in September 2013, from a ruptured pipeline owned by Sun-Canadian Pipeline Co. spewed diesel into the St. Clair River. Bradley was not happy.

But, that aside, pipelines haven’t been a major issue for Sarnia, he says. Line 9 flew under the radar all these years, until Enbridge announced its reversal plans.

“I personally welcome the reversal process,” says Bradley. “It does get us away from the use of foreign fuel. It’s exactly why that line was devised that way.”

But, he insists, it has to meet the “highest possible standards.”

Bradley is a member of the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Cities Initiative, a group of more than 100 mayors from both Canada and the U.S., that’s urged federal regulators to demand Enbridge meet a host of conditions prior to the project’s approval, such as creating a liability fund to cover spill costs and devising detailed, site-specific emergency plans.

Sarnia is working hard to shed its image as an industrial wasteland. It’s home now to a solar farm, a bio-innovation centre; there’s a biofuel plant under construction.

Like some of its industrial cousins — Hamilton comes to mind — its downtown is awash in art galleries and cafes. It’s becoming a place where young, creative folk can live relatively cheaply and pursue their arts.

Vidal St. is quieter now than back in its heyday. The 1990s saw 6,000 to 7,000 jobs lost in Chemical Valley, in a city with a population of 75,000. But 5,000 still work in construction, tending to the perpetual tide of repairs and upgrades in the factories and pipelines.

And, as Bradley points out, there’s a truth that’s uncomfortable to some: Canadians use the products made here in this place every day.

“If you drove here, gasoline in the car came probably from Imperial or Suncor. The carbon black in the tires came from Cabot. The plastics more than likely came from one of the plastic manufacturers here,” says Bradley.

“Everyday, you function with what’s made here. It’s part of life. You can argue about whether that’s the way it should be. But the reality right now is that everything that’s made here is critical to Canadians’ lifestyle.”

AAMJIWNAANG FIRST NATION — Vanessa Gray grew up smack in the middle of Sarnia’s industrial heartland.

The Aamjiwnaang First Nation, where she lives, is wedged into the area commonly called Chemical Valley, some 60 refineries and chemical plants within 25 kilometres of the community of about 1,000.

As a kid, she had asthma. She didn’t swim in the water. Kids played ball in the diamond across Churchill Rd. from the styrene plant. They still do. She knew when you heard a siren to go inside right away. The smell of rotten eggs signalled serious trouble — a leak of hydrogen sulfide, nasty stuff used as poison gas in World War 1.

She didn’t think too much of it back then. It was normal.

“To other people outside of Aamjiwnaang, that’s really shocking,” says Gray. “But that’s all I knew. This is what I know to be home, seeing Suncor and Imperial Oil.”

Now, at 21, Gray is one of Aamjiwnaang’s more active protesters. She’s blocked roads leading to industrial facilities. She’s organized demonstrations across the province. Last month in Toronto, she was among the group that forced a work stop at an Enbridge construction site.

It started in 2012, when Gray returned from the Healing Walk, a yearly pilgrimage near Fort McMurray in northern Alberta to protest environmental damage and support communities living near the oilsands. Interest piqued, the Line 9 project came to her attention around the same time. It became a chief target.

The pipeline runs near the Aamjiwnaang reserve, close to homes, waterways and some of the only forests left in Chemical Valley.

“I just don’t think we should risk what little land we have left here,” says Gray, who’s in her first year at Trent University now. “Here in the valley, we already deal with a lot of concerns and risks to our health and the environment. I think Line 9 is something we shouldn’t gamble on.”

Ada Lockridge has big worries about those health impacts.

In the living room of Lockridge’s home on Vidal St. S., asked whether leaks or releases have posed problems in the past, Lockridge, Gray and a few others burst out laughing. Between chortles comes the answer: yes.

Sarnia has the most polluted air in Canada, according to a 2011 World Health Organization report. A study on birth rates between 1999 and 2003 found twice as many girls as boys born on Aamjiwnaang. A later study found higher-than-average exposure to chemicals such as cadmium and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs). That 2013 McGill University research wasn’t conclusive as to the cause, or effect, of the chemical exposure, but previous research has linked PCBs to low male birth rates.

Lockridge, 51, flips through a calendar. She notes each time she hears a siren, a warning of a possible leak at a nearby plant. There are more than a dozen some months; there are several in a day some days. Since she started doing this in 2004, she recalls a couple, maybe a few months, when her calendar page was empty.

Lockridge and Gray say there are two must-see places on a tour of Chemical Valley.

One is the Aamjiwnaang cemetery, an ancient place cut off from the rest of the reserve, hemmed in by huge white Suncor storage tanks on one side, a gas pumping station on the other. And then there is the plaque along Vidal St. S., erected for the village of Blue Water. It was settled by tradesmen and labourers from around the world in 1942 to build a rubber plant for the war effort. More than 2,300 people lived there. By 1966, all residents had been relocated “due to health and safety concerns.”

Charlie Fairbank, oil producer

A beautiful thing

Charlie Fairbank. JESSICA MCDIARMID / TORONTO STAR

OIL SPRINGS, Ont. — This is where it all began.

The first gusher to blow sky high, the subsequent stampede of seekers of fortune to this flat former lake bed in southwest Ontario.

Soon, oil soaked the ground black; a rumoured 5 million barrels flowed down Black Creek, where horses drank and men took their baths.

The boom left as quickly as it had come, moving slightly north to Petrolia, where it raged until the early 20th century.

The Fairbank company started here in Oil Springs in 1861. It’s never left family hands.

The site of the continent’s first oil craze is now a nostalgic place, where oil is drawn in roughly the same quantities as 150 years ago, using many of the same methods; where pump jacks and the jerker lines that pull them creak gently on a pastoral landscape and the family patriarch stands atop a snowy hill behind his home looking over it all with the revering eyes of a farmer for his fields.

In the summer, says Fairbank, 72, when the oil comes up into the sunlight, it has a beautiful green hue, a creamy texture.

“It’s just lovely stuff.”

The Line 9 reversal would help these small-scale producers, says Fairbank.

“It’s an important thing, because we’d be able to get the oil east,” he says. “We should be able to change things when conditions change. It seems to be not so easy to do so.”

Fairbank, like his father before him, didn’t intend to go into the oil business. He came home “at loose ends” when he was about 30, went out into one of these fields to dig drainage ditches. It had been a wet spring.

Within an hour, he knew this was what he wanted to do.

His father insisted Fairbank have some sort of backup plan. Oil was at $3.83 a barrel and prices had been low for 50 years.

Fairbank spent three years teaching in Pickering and came back. Within a month of his return, the oil embargo of 1973 hit, driving prices up 70 per cent virtually overnight. By January 1974, prices had quadrupled.

“I’ve been here ever since,” he says.

Part of what’s now preservation — Fairbank hopes to have the oilfields listed as a heritage site — was accidental. For those decades of low prices, the business couldn’t afford upgrades.

And when Fairbank took over, he came to love the techniques, the skills, that were nearly lost. He wanted to preserve it.

“It’s a legacy,” he says. “It’s a beautiful thing, it’s like reading classical literature. It’s just a very simple, clean thing to do.”

One day, his sons will own or manage the oilfield. It produces about 24,000 barrels a year, similar to what it always has. Fairbank has bought up surrounding fields, in part to bolster declining production, in part so they weren’t converted to something else.

“It’s too important for that,” says Fairbank.

Driving along Gypsie Flats Rd. through the sweet, thick smell of oil hanging heavy in the air, Fairbank stops himself from giving his “rant.” Then he does anyway.

“In many ways, we still haven’t figured out that it’s the value of the stuff we should be looking at, not the price,” he says. “We use too much of it. It’s kind of like letting 5 million barrels go down the creek.”